They earn three rubles a month, the price of the rapidly emptying canister of wine that sits next to the camp stove.
We hand them bowls of potatoes and canned beef; we pour more wine. Yura tunes his guitar and sings Vladimir Vysotsky songs about war that everyone knows by heart. When darkness creeps behind us and pounces without warning, Vitya and Serega, full of wine and food for the first time since they were assigned here four months ago, trudge away, dogs following reluctantly, their chains dragging on the gravel behind them.
“Hey, you forgot your guns,” yells Boris into their backs.
“That was a hell of a military force,” says Nina. “I hope they don’t attack us like that again.”
We never find out if Vitya and Serega have received new uniforms. From now on, we only see them on top of the mountain, outlined against the sky, too far away to see the holes in their shirts or their boots, too far away to even wave hello.
IN RESPONSE TO MY Postcard with a view of Novy Svet, my mother sends a letter to the local post office marked “general delivery.” In my postcard I wrote: I’m all right here in the new world. Of course, I said nothing about Boris. It was shocking enough for my mother to find out I was living on a beach; I couldn’t possibly say I was living on a beach with a man. Sex is a deep and shameful secret not meant to be discussed. In our books, printed by the state publishing house, Progress, a man and a woman may break steel-production records or risk their lives to protect a collective, but they’ll never find themselves in the same bed. Western films are dubbed into a benign Russian version, racy scenes carved out. Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are allowed to kiss, but usually viewed from the back and only for two seconds.
My mother’s anatomy charts of human reproductive systems, despite the unabashed names of their parts, fail to reveal a single crumb of insight into what makes sex such a dishonorable thing. Such a dark force that must be eviscerated from films and never mentioned in our books. “We don’t have sex in the Soviet Union,” said a stern woman from the Ministry of Culture in a recent TV interview, when a French reporter asked a provocative question about Lelouch’s film A Man and a Woman, dubbed into Russian and recently released into our theaters. Is it possible that happy, shameless sex has been successfully eradicated by the Great October Socialist Revolution, along with social inequality and decent shoes?
I am not as ignorant about sex as I am about Babi Yar. In spite of my country’s taboo and my mother’s silence, or maybe because of it, I’ve taken the initiative to investigate the subject on my own. By the end of ninth grade, just before I turned sixteen, I had to know more. When my mother left for the provinces to visit Aunt Muza that April, my sister invited her actor friends to a party in our apartment. The actors brought wine, and I was drinking Riesling, sour and warm, out of a glass used only for special occasions. The sounds of the piano banged and warbled in the air, professional voices climbed the ladder of the scales, laughter floated on the clouds of smoke. The Riesling was making me happy and unafraid. I wiggled closer to big, dark-eyed Gennadii, who had recently made a film that was sending the girls in my class reaching for their handkerchiefs, and positioned myself on the divan next to his solid elbow. He poured me more wine; he suggested we go out to the stair landing for fresh air.
I leaned on the wall between the flights leading to the attic; I breathed in to keep my balance under his massive hands. His mouth, smelling of wine, clamped on mine; his tongue wrapped around my teeth. With my mouth plugged, I stood there estimating how long I could go without breathing while his fingers slipped under my bra. “Remember this,” a silly thought raced through my mind as Gennadii was lowering his face to my breasts, “this is what men want.”
His head shuttled between my face and my chest, smudging my skin, coating it with a drunken cigarette smell. Not knowing what to do with my hands, I wrapped them around his neck while he was turning my lips inside out in his mouth and squeezing me into the wall with his hips. Then he stopped, as abruptly as he started, and I stood there staring into his open shirt and a black clump of chest hair. I lowered my arms and pressed my wet palms into the wall. My lips felt bloated and chapped, my nipples chilled by air. He peeled my hand off the wall and, with a little guilty smile, led me down the stairs, back into the drunken noise of our apartment.
In my first year at the university, when Nina and I had a discussion about sex, I told her about Gennadii and the stair landing and why it felt like an epiphany. “My head was spinning,” I said, failing to mention the Riesling. “He was twenty years older than me and he smelled of tobacco, even his chest hair, even the shirt he was wearing.” Nina squinted through our own cigarette smoke and blew out a small menthol cloud. “You’re looking for your father,” she said and peered at me from above her glasses, a glance that seemed a bit too intimidating to warrant a response.
Was I looking for my father the following year, when my quest took me a step further, for a dose of real sex? Seks, blunt and sibilant, so rarely used in public that it sounds like a curse. In our tenth-grade history book—the only place I ever saw the word in print—it was listed among the ugly characteristics of bourgeois society, next to violence and unemployment. I insinuated myself into the bed of a charismatic theater director who ran the university amateur acting studio, by saying that I was lost and needed his direction. Afterward, I peered at myself in a mirror, trying to discern a significant change, a sign of instant maturation and wisdom, manifested by what? There was not a centimeter of difference that I could see, not a wrinkle of a metamorphosis that would brand me an adult, worthy of a place among the ranks of the enlightened and the experienced. It wasn’t ugly, as the textbook had warned, but it didn’t transport me into a higher realm of being or thinking. The only thing it seemed to have accomplished was to make me more cynical: this sordid, heavily-guarded secret amounted, in effect, to not much more than a few minutes of awkwardness. With lights off, the director’s charisma had dimmed, too. Despite all its promised tantalizing danger, sex was nothing out of the ordinary.
Not at all like making love to Boris, which makes me forget his Ukrainian accent and his rantings about the war and Babi Yar. He has a splendid cinnamon tan, and in the dusk I see his body as if through the green prism of water, shimmering along the rocks when he hunts for crabs. It is simple to be with Boris, as uncomplicated as elbowing in line for tomatoes at a local store, as basic as living on the beach. Yet I still feel guilty whenever he rolls up a blanket and we climb into the mountains. This is what sex has become associated with in my mind—a deep sense of shame. Something performed illicitly and in the dark.
Still I could’ve been partially honest in my postcard sent home and said I had a crush on a guy from Kiev. But I didn’t. I’d never admit to such an emotional weakness as falling in love. She’s in love, my mother would whisper with an understanding sigh that conveys her pity. She’d feel sorry for me, or worry about me, or give me advice I didn’t want. Back in Leningrad, if I feel like seeing Boris, I’ll simply buy a ticket for Kiev and tell my mother I’m going to visit some friends. Instead of talking about Boris, or infatuations, or love, we’ll talk about the price of a railway fare and the availability of linens on the train.
My sister is not afraid to announce she is in love. When she went on a theater tour last summer, she wrote us a letter every two days pining for the son of the artistic director. All it caused was my mother’s injured whispering to a neighbor, her sad tirades that the director’s son would never marry Marina because she is too old or because she is an actress, her sighing and lamenting that Marina should have applied to medical school. Yet precisely because she is an actress, my sister doesn’t care that she is baring herself to the ears of the entire floor of our apartment building. She is bold; she’s above the gossip; she is not afraid. Me? I’d rather die than give my mother the advantage of sighing and pitying me. In my grandmother’s words, what’s inside you no one can touch.
In her letter, my mother says that her brother, my un
cle Vova, who wasn’t killed during the war and now lives in the town of Ryazan, is vacationing only five kilometers from where I am, in a House of Rest and Recreation, where he was sent because he is a war veteran. Maybe I can arrange to see him, she says, giving me his Crimean phone number.
I don’t mind seeing Uncle Vova. I mostly know him from letters and birthday cards with the poems he likes to compose. They’re amateurish poems, but there is a powerful line now and then, a line that sinks deep and rakes up something I’ve been thinking. So I don’t dismiss his poems as I do my aunt Muza’s, who rhymes any two words that float into her head and then mails them to us on glossy cards embossed with roses.
Also, I wouldn’t mind getting away from our beach for a day. Even the sea, salty and warm and green, can become monotonous if that’s all you see for four weeks.
I call my uncle and we meet at a bus stop in the village where he’s living, the biggest landmark we can think of. I bring a bottle of champagne made in Novy Svet, at one of the only two champagne-producing vineyards in the country. It’s real vintage champagne, made exclusively for export, with a complicated yellow label I’ve never seen before, not the usual champagne called Sovetskoye, which is cooked under pressure for four months before it is released into the stores. The export-quality champagne was procured from a truck driver Nina and I flagged down because we needed gasoline for our camp stove, a generous driver who siphoned five liters of state gas for us and whom we invited down to the beach for mussels and wine.
Uncle Vova stands on the dusty shoulder of the road, smiling. His smile is a little crooked: the right corner of his mouth seems suspended by an invisible thread, surrounded by scarred, almost white skin, the result of a burn. I’ve always assumed that the burned skin was a Great Patriotic War trophy and imagined him climbing out of a burning tank or tossing grenades into battalions of advancing Germans. But last year I found out he’d burned his face in a school accident in chemistry class when he was eleven. He was miserable in the hospital, my mother said, wailing in pain whenever they changed the dressing because the bandages kept sticking to the wound, tearing off pieces of burned skin along with the fabric. Then an innovative surgeon came up with the idea to have my grandmother buy bars of chocolate, no matter how expensive or difficult it was to get. After Vova ate the chocolate, the surgeon sterilized the silver foil it was wrapped in and used it instead of bandages for dressing. The skin didn’t stick to the foil; the taste of the chocolate was exquisite because it was rare, and Vova recovered in record time.
“Black as a Negro,” says my uncle, looking me over with his twisted smile.
“We live on the beach,” I say. “We’re all black.”
“Boys and girls together?” he asks, squinting and pretending to make a serious face.
I like my uncle. Instead of sighing and worrying about my living on the beach with boys, as my mother would do, he winks and asks me about the bottle of champagne I’m carrying. When I tell him the truck driver story, his eyes glimmer with respect and a flicker of admiration at my ingenuity and my guts. Nina and I stood on the road in bathing suits, trying to look helpless, an empty canister for gas hidden in the underbrush.
The truth is that normally I don’t have any guts. Back in Leningrad, it makes me cringe to attract the smallest bit of attention to myself, but here, in this new world of Novy Svet, I am fearless, as if it’s not even me, as if the sun had branded me with a new identity. Here I can be outrageous and carefree. I sit cross-legged in the warm dust of a road shoulder with a cigarette, attracting punishing glances from passing mothers with teenage daughters in tow. I crawl under rows of vines at a local collective farm, plucking down bunches of grapes. The other day Nina and I climbed onto the biggest rock hanging over our cove and recited Hamlet’s soliloquy in English in front of the whole Kiev group, in front of the whole Black Sea, which by that time of night was literally black. Granted, we’d been drinking mugfuls of wine, but I can’t imagine reciting anything, in Russian or English, in front of my friends back home, even if it were pitch black outside, even if they’d asked.
“So what do you say if we drink to our meeting?” offers my uncle. To my new, fearless self, drinking on a bench sounds thrilling. As he’s already complained to me, the House of Rest and Recreation doesn’t allow alcohol on the premises. If I’d wanted a sanatorium, he says, I’d have stayed home with my wife.
We find a bench under a strange gnarled tree that doesn’t grow in the north. Uncle Vova pops the champagne open, and we take turns sipping from the bottle. The warm bubbles back up my nose and make me hiccup; to my chagrin, I cannot tell the difference between this export-quality rarity and the Sovetskoye champagne we buy for the New Year’s holiday. But my uncle seems pleased, and the other side of his mouth, the unburned side, curls up, too.
We sit in the shade of the strange tree and talk about the Crimea. I tell him about a militia raid, and wine squirting out of vending machines, and seawater fluorescing at night. He tells me that the House of Rest and Recreation has a ten o’clock curfew. Then we walk to where he’s staying, a cement building with uniform institutional blinds. In front of it, there are small trees planted in rows, just a hundred meters from the sea. “It’s dinnertime soon,” he says. “Let’s go up to my room and I’ll try to sneak in some food from the cafeteria.”
The room is small and functional, but what I see through an open door strikes me as almost surreal: in the halo of white tile gleams a bathroom. For four weeks I’ve washed in the sea, rubbing my hair with a bar of laundry soap, trying to make it lather in the salty water. My uncle’s bathroom, with its luxuries of white porcelain and chrome, could have floated directly from the pages of the Western magazines our customs officials routinely confiscate at the border.
“Pretty pathetic, eh?” comments Uncle Vova, watching me freeze on the bathroom threshold. “From a place for war veterans you’d expect something more modern.” I truly don’t know what he means. The tiles sparkle and blind me; the water gurgles out of the spout, abundant fresh water that makes soap bubble and blaze with every color of the rainbow. I unleash more water—from a bathtub faucet, from a showerhead—and it rushes out in cascades of silver, splendid water without color or taste.
Uncle Vova smiles and closes the door. Water splatters onto my skin, which has become as dark and dense as a hide, so dark that my fingernails glow like pale lights, that I can see a border between the suntanned skin of my instep and my white sole. I soap my hair into a heap of lather; I lie in the tub rubbing my skin free of the four weeks of salt. When I finally stick my head out the door, my uncle says he has to go down to the cafeteria if he doesn’t want to miss dinner. “I’ll steal something good for you,” he promises.
I feel so clean I’m weightless. I glide around the room, around another surreal entity, a bed with sheets. I’ll just try what it feels like, I think, the feeling of white cotton against the skin, but the next thing I hear is Uncle Vova’s voice telling me I’m missing some great kotlety with mushroom sauce he’s hidden in a towel. “You’ve been sleeping for two hours,” he laughs. “Don’t you have time to sleep on the beach?”
I see a plate covered with newspaper as he unwraps a towel, but my head doesn’t want to part with the pillow and my arms seem glued to the sheets.
He takes away the newspaper, revealing two perfect kotlety under the blanket of brown sauce, definitely not extracted from a can, that seem as delicious and unreal as a mirage.
He watches me chew with his crooked half-smile, not lamenting that I am not sleeping in a real bed or eating properly, not accusing my friend Nina of dragging me down to the Crimea to live exposed to the elements like a homeless bomzh, not asking about Boris or if there is a Boris. And even if he asked, I bet he could keep a secret. After all, he was the one who performed an abortion on my mother when she was between husbands and when abortion was illegal. I know this because in a drawer of my mother’s desk I found a blue notebook, its pages covered with her square handwriting, detai
ling her life before she moved to Leningrad. She must have written it for posterity, and that meant for me. So I read it. And even then, at fifteen, I found it ironic that out of the three siblings in her family who survived the war, my mother, so much in love with order and the proper way of doing things—far more than Uncle Vova or even Aunt Muza—is the only one who has had three marriages, three hasty unions, of which none seemed perfect or even good.
I know this is the last time I will see Uncle Vova like this, just me and him, with no family bustling around to tell us not to swill champagne out of a bottle or not to steal food from the cafeteria or not to do something else disorderly, whatever it is.
We give each other a tight hug and stay in each other’s arms for a minute, both cherishing the moment, both knowing it won’t happen again. I’m grateful to Uncle Vova for being twisted-lipped and incurious, for not asking and not pitying. I’m grateful for the stolen kotlety in mushroom sauce.
I get back to the cove when it’s dark and the mattresses are already scattered in their night positions on the beach. It looks tranquil and safe, like a Pioneer summer camp, where days are predictable and easy. Maybe my mother is right, after all, and life under the open sky does have its perils. Sameness, for instance—the sum of perfect weather and the perfect songs Yura keeps strumming on his guitar. Uncensored sex, for instance—with no one to ban or even diminish it with a slant-eyed look, robbing it of tension, smudging it with the dust of the ordinary.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 24
